Airrived, a startup promoting the ‘agentic OS’, is emerging from stealth following a successful funding round. Airrived’s platform aims to combine SecOps, governance, identity management, IT, and business processes into a single AI-driven system.
That’s a laundry list of disciplines, but that comprehensiveness is precisely Airrived’s goal. It hopes to create an operating layer on top of all kinds of IT components, but not just with ready-made solutions. According to Airrived, an agentic OS should revolve around fine-tuning LLMs, so-called deep-reasoning agents, and orchestrated intelligence. In other words: no fixed playbooks, but a tailor-made AI layer that takes care of IT work in all shapes and sizes.
According to Airrived, AI tools are already fragmenting. Currently, this is mainly because companies are working with separate AI copilots and what the start-up calls ‘bolted-on’ solutions. In order to have a systematic rollout of AI without relying on playbooks, Airrived co-founder and CEO Anurag Gurtu argues that companies need ‘a new foundation’ for AI.
From experimentation to standardization
Pilots are moving into production, according to Gartner. Around 40 percent of business applications are expected to contain task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026. But that’s not enough, according to Shelley Jhuang of Airrived investor Cannage Capital. She praises the “composable” nature of Airrived. Plug and Play Ventures partner Amit Patel is also positive about security. He believes Airrived helps reduce handoffs between applications and staff. This should reduce the number of errors and lead to faster execution of security work.
The $6.1 million funding round received support from Cannage Capital and Plug and Play Ventures, as well as contributions from Rebellion Ventures and Inner Loop Capital.
Agentic OS, AI OS, AI control tower…
The wording differs per IT vendor, but the objective is often the same: to build a central AI layer. AI agents can be managed via ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower or MuleSoft’s Agent Fabric, while VAST DATA sees an opportunity to introduce the “AI OS” from its data platform. There are many ways to skin a cat, as it turns out. But Airrived believes that a whole new category is needed to counteract a fragmented landscape of AI agents.
It is not necessarily the case that one of these approaches will prevail over all other visions in the short term. It depends on the existing IT infrastructure and which applications are considered the actual management layer within it. Security teams may be interested in a solution such as Airrived’s to link their existing solutions, while departments focused on service delivery and customer contact are more likely to look at the applications they use on a daily basis.